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32

Jobs

1

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22

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Description

What is
Node.js?

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

What is
Meteor?

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

What is
Hanami?

Use the 100+ features that we offer to build powerful products without compromising memory. Hanami consumes 60% less memory than other full-featured Ruby frameworks.

Want advice about which of these to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Reviews of Node.js, Meteor, and Hanami

MichelFloyd

Simply a great full-stack platform

May 26, 2016 12:53

I discovered Meteor thanks to my daughter who used it for a project at MIT. I was amazed at how much she had built in such a short time. I had also been trying to figure out how to build a browser-based crypto app so I jumped into Meteor and had an MVP for cloak.ly in a few short months starting from nothing. Learning Meteor really alters what you perceive as easy and difficult in full-stack development. It has an amazing ability to simplify your thinking and your code. Community support in terms of packages is outstanding as well which saves tremendous time. The quality of the software is outstanding with very few regressions cropping up during their frequent releases.

Being at the bleeding edge of the js community does have its downsides however. While early Meteor (with Blaze/handlebars templates) was exceedingly simple, Meteor have had to introduce support for both angular and react. In combination with the move to ECMAscript this has resulted in a lot of work for developers to just keep up with the evolution of the platform. Someone who was an expert 6 months ago might quickly find themselves being a newb again. If you're someone who doesn't like change you may want to stick to jQuery.

Living in the bay area I have the luxury of being able to attend Meteor events frequently. Having met many members of the MDG team, I have tremendous confidence in the future of the platform. This is a very solid group with a rare combination of broad vision and excellent execution.

Ease of Use
Documentation
Reliability
Support

samuelwight

Makes developing fun again

August 14, 2015 17:47

Meteor is my favorite framework. It makes everything fun. Syncing data across devices is really easy and you don't have to mess around with sockets at all. You can insert data into the database on the client. There's tons of security options. There's over 3000 packages on the packaging system. Instant iOS and Android apps. Amazing, reactive routing. Free hosting. Easy deployment with Meteor Up. What's not to like?

How developers use Node.js vs Meteor vs Hanami

We decided to move the provisioning process to an API-driven process, and had to decide among a few implementation languages:

Go, the server-side language from Google

NodeJS, an asynchronous framework in Javascript

We built prototypes in both languages, and decided on NodeJS:

NodeJS is asynchronous-by-default, which suited the problem domain. Provisioning is more like “start the job, let me know when you’re done” than a traditional C-style program that’s CPU-bound and needs low-level efficiency.

NodeJS acts as an HTTP-based service, so exposing the API was trivial

Getting into the headspace and internalizing the assumptions of a tool helps pick the right one. NodeJS assumes services will be non-blocking/event-driven and HTTP-accessible, which snapped into our scenario perfectly. The new NodeJS architecture resulted in a staggering 95% reduction in processing time: requests went from 7.5 seconds to under a second.

The server side of Trello is built in Node.js. We knew we wanted instant propagation of updates, which meant that we needed to be able to hold a lot of open connections, so an event-driven, non-blocking server seemed like a good choice. Node also turned out to be an amazing prototyping tool for a single-page app. The prototype version of the Trello server was really just a library of functions that operated on arrays of Models in the memory of a single Node.js process, and the client simply invoked those functions through a very thin wrapper over a WebSocket. This was a very fast way for us to get started trying things out with Trello and making sure that the design was headed in the right direction. We used the prototype version to manage the development of Trello and other internal projects at Fog Creek.

We have a SOA for our systems. It isn't quite Microservices jsut yet, but it does provide domain encapsulation for our systems allowing the leaderboards to fail without affecting the login or education content.

We've written a few internal modules including a very simple api framework.

I ended up picking Node.js because the game client is entirely in JavaScript as well. This choice made it a lot easier for developers to cross borders between being "client side" game developers and "server side" game developers. It also meant that the pool of knowledge/best practices is applicable almost across the company.

Node.js is the foundation for the server. Using Express.js for serving up web content, and sockets.io for synchronizing communications between all clients and the server, the entire game runs as Javascript in Node.js.

I don't know how well this will scale if/when I have hundreds of people connected simultaneously, but I suspect that when that time comes, it may be just a matter of increasing the hardware.

As for why I chose Node.js... I just love JavaScript! My code is all original, meaning that I didn't have to inherit anyone's bad Javascript. I'm perfectly capable of creating my own bad Javascript, thank you! Also, npm rocks!

Used node.js server as backend. Interacts with MongoDB using MongoSkin package which is a wrapper for the MongoDB node.js driver.
It uses express for routing and cors package for enabling cors and eyes package for enhancing readability of logs.
Also I use nodemon which takes away the effort to restart the server after making changes.